What do the U.S. government and Silicon
Valley have in common? Above all, they want to remain opaque while
making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of our data.

As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com. She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. Solnit’s latest book, The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010.

Finally, journalists have started criticizing in earnest
the leviathans of Silicon Valley, notably
Google, now the world’s third-largest company in market value. The new round of
discussion began even before the revelations that the tech giants were
routinely sharing our data with the National Security Agency, or maybe merging with it. Simultaneously another set of journalists,
apparently unaware that the weather has changed, is still sneering at San Francisco, my hometown, for not lying down and loving Silicon Valley’s looming presence.

The criticism of Silicon Valley
is long overdue and some of the critiques are both thoughtful and scathing. The
New Yorker, for example, has
explored how start-ups are undermining the purpose of education at
Stanford University, addressed the Valley’s messianic delusions and political
meddling, and considered Apple’s massive tax avoidance.

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The New York Times
recently published an opinion piece that startled me, especially when I checked
the byline. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the fugitive in the Ecuadorean
Embassy in London,
focused onThe New
Digital Age, a book by top Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared
Cohen that to him exemplifies the melding of the technology corporation and the
state. It is, he claimed, a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for
technocratic imperialism, from two of our leading “witch doctors who construct
a new idiom for United
States global power in the twenty-first
century.” He added, “This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the
State Department and Silicon Valley.”

What do the U.S.
government and Silicon Valley already have in common? Above all, they want to remain
opaque while making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of
our data. What is arising is simply a new form of government, involving vast
entities with the reach and power of government and little accountability to
anyone.

Google, the company with the motto “Don’t
be evil,” is rapidly becoming an empire. Not an empire of territory, as was Rome or the Soviet Union,
but an empire controlling our access to data and our data itself. Antitrust lawsuits
proliferating around the company demonstrate its quest for monopoly control
over information in the information age. Its search engine has become
indispensable for most of us, and as Google critic and media professor Siva
Vaidhyanathan puts it in his 2012 book The Googlization of Everything, “[W]e now allow
Google to determine what is important, relevant, and true on the Web and in the
world. We trust and believe that Google acts in our best interest. But we have
surrendered control over the values, methods, and processes that make sense of
our information ecosystem.” And that’s just the search engine.

About three-quarters of a billion
people use Gmail, which conveniently gives Google access to the content of
their communications (scanned in such a way that they can target ads at you).
Google tried and failed to claim proprietary control of digital versions of
every book ever published; librarians and publishers fought back on that one.
As the New York Timesreported last fall, Paul Aiken, executive director of the
Authors Guild, summed the situation up this way: “Google continues to profit
from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to
authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors
continues.”

The nonprofit Consumer Watchdog wrote to the attorney general on June 12th urging him “to
block Google’s just announced $1 billion acquisition of Waze, developers of a
mobile mapping application, on antitrust grounds... Google already dominates
the online mapping business with Google Maps. The Internet giant was able to
muscle its way to dominance by unfairly favoring its own service ahead of such
competitors as Mapquest in its online search results. Now with the proposed
Waze acquisition, the Internet giant would remove the most viable competitor to
Google Maps in the mobile space. Moreover it will allow Google access to even
more data about online activity in a way that will increase its dominant
position on the Internet.”

The company seems to be cornering the online mapping
business, seems in fact to be cornering so many things that eventually they may
have us cornered.

In Europe, there’s an
antitrust lawsuit over Google’s Android phone apps. In many ways, you can map
Google’s rise by the litter of antitrust lawsuits it crushed en route. By the
way, Google bought Motorola. You know it owns YouTube, right? That makes Google
possessor of the second and third most visited Websites on earth. (Facebook is
first, and two more of the top six are also in Silicon
Valley.)

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Imagine that it’s 1913 and the post office, the phone
company, the public library, printing houses, the U.S. Geological Survey mapping
operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive
corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the
online world that’s more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote
that Google is trying to take over “the entire fucking Internet” and asked the
question of the day: “Who will stop Google?”

The Tipping Point

We ask that question all the time in San Francisco, because here Google isn’t just
on our computers, it’s on our streets. I wrote earlier this year about “the
Google bus” --
the armadas of private Wi-Fi-equipped luxury buses that run through our streets
and use our public bus stops, often blocking city buses and public
transit passengers while they load or unload the employees taking the long ride
down the peninsula to their corporation of choice. Google, Apple, Facebook, and
Genentech run some of the bigger fleets, and those mostly unmarked white buses
have become a symbol of the transformation of the city.

Carl Nolte, the old native son who writes a column for
the (dying) San Francisco Chronicle,
said this month of the future inhabitants of 22,000 high-priced
apartments under construction, “These new apartment dwellers will all be new
San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the
progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old
waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about. This is already a
high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't
afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped
precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day.
You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait. These are the good old days,
but it won't last. We are at a tipping point.”

Mr. Nolte, you can tell, doesn’t particularly like this.
A guy named Ilan Greenberg at the New
Republic popped up to tell us that we must like it -- or face his
ridicule. He writes, “Ironically, the anti-gentrifiers themselves
undermine San Francisco’s
liberal ethos. Opposed to newcomers? Wary of people whose values you don't
understand? Critical of young people for not living up to an older generation’s
ideals? It all sounds very reactionary and close-minded.” The problem is that
we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot
of us don’t like them.

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn’t mean
subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone
who doesn’t work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller
companies hoping to become a global monolith. Greenberg (who is, incidentally,
writing for a publication quietly bought up by a Facebook billionaire) sneers
at us for defending middle-class people, but “middle class” is just a word for
those of us who get paid decently for our work. People at various income levels
in a diversity of fields here in San
Francisco are being replaced by those who work in one
field and get paid extremely well. Small, alternative, and nonprofit
institutions are also struggling and going down. It’s like watching a meadow
being plowed under for, say, Monsanto genetically modified soybeans.

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Speaking of meadows, one of Silicon Valley’s
billionaires, Napster founder and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, just threw
himself a $10 million wedding on environmentally sensitive land in Big Sur. In the
course of building a massive fantasy set for the event, “including
grading, change in use from campground to private event, construction of
multiple structures including a gateway and arch, an artificial pond, a stone
bridge, multiple event platforms with elevated floors, rock walls, artificially
created ruins of cottages and castle walls,” he reportedly did significant environmental damage and violated regulations.

Apparently paying $2.5 million in fines after the fact
didn’t bother him. Napster and Spotify are, incidentally, online technologies
that have reduced musicians’ profits from their recordings to almost nothing.
There are tremendously wealthy musicians, of course, but a lot of them are at
best, yes, middle class. Thanks to Parker, maybe a little less so.

Teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians,
firefighters -- consider them representatives of the middle class under siege,
as well as the people who keep a city viable and diverse. Friends of mine -- a
painter, a poet, a filmmaker, a photographer, all of whom have contributed to San Francisco’s culture
-- have been evicted so that more affluent people may replace them. There’s a
widespread tendency to think that defending culture means defending privileged
white people, but that assumes that people of color and poor people aren’t
artists. Here, they are.

Everyone here understands that if a musician -- hip-hop
or symphony -- can’t afford a home, neither can a janitor and her family. And
competition for those apartments is fierce, so fierce that these days no one I
know can find a rental on the open market. I couldn’t when I moved in 2011;
neither could a physician friend earlier this year. The tech kids come in and
offer a year in cash up front or raise the asking price or both, and the
housing supply continues to wither, while rents skyrocket. So while Greenberg
might like you to think that we’re selfishly not offering a seat at the table,
it’s more like old people and working families and people whose careers were shaped
by idealism are objecting to being thrown under the, well, bus.

Like Gandhi, Only With
Guns

Enough minions of Silicon Valley’s
mighty corporations could arrive to create a monoculture. In some parts of
town, it already is the dominant culture. A guy who made a fortune in the
dot-com boom and moved to the Mission District (the partly Latino, formerly
blue-collar eye of the housing hurricane) got locals’ attention recently with a
blog post titled “Douchebags Like You are Ruining San Francisco.” In it, he
described the churlish and sometimes predatory behavior of the very young and
very wealthy toward the elderly, the poor, and the nonwhite.

He wrote, “You’re on MUNI [the city bus system] and watch a
20-something guy reluctantly give up his seat to an elderly woman and then say
loudly to his friends, ‘I don’t know why old people ride MUNI. If I were old
I’d just take Uber.’” Yeah, I had to look it up, too: Uber.com, a limousine
taxi service you access via a smartphone app. A friend of mine overheard a
young techie in line to buy coffee say to someone on his phone that he was
working on an app that would be “like Food Not Bombs, to distribute food, only
for profit.” Saying you're going to be like a group dedicated to free food,
only for profit, is about as deranged as saying you're going to be like Gandhi,
only with guns.

“An influx of techies will mean more patrons for the
arts,” trilled an article at the Silicon Valley
news site Pando, but as of yet those notable patrons have not made an
appearance. As a local alternative weekly reported, “The tech world in general is notoriously
uncharitable: According to the Chronicle
of Philanthropy, only four of 2011's 50 most generous U.S. donors
worked in tech, despite the fact that 13 of Forbes
50 Richest Americans in 2012 had made some or all of their fortunes in tech.”
Medici in their machinations, they are not Medici-style patrons. There is no
noticeable trickle-down in the Bay Area, no significant benevolence toward the
needy or good causes or culture from the new tech fortunes.

Instead, we get San Francisco newcomer, Facebook CEO, and billionaire Mark
Zuckerberg pursuing his own interest with ruthless disregard for life on Earth.
This year, Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that
sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers. There
has been no ideology involved, only expediency, in how FWD.us pursued its ends.
It decided to put its massive financial clout to work giving politicians
whatever they wanted in hopes that this would lead to an advantageous quid pro quo arrangement. Toward that
end, the group began running ads in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline (that will bring particularly
carbon-dirty tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast) to support a
Republican senator and other ads in favor of drilling in Alaska’s pristine
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to support an Alaskan Democrat.

The takeaway message seemed to be that nothing is off
limits in pursuing self-interest, and that the actual meaning and consequences
of these climate-impacting projects was not of concern at least to that
29-year-old who's also the 25th richest person in the United States.
(To give credit where it’s due: Silicon Valley
billionaire Elon Musk, Paypal cofounder and electric car mogul, quit FWD.us.) Zuckerberg and his Valley associates were
pushing things they didn’t care about and demonstrating that they didn’t care
about much except what makes their corporations run and their profits rise.
Here, where the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and many are environmentally
minded, this didn’t go over well. Protests ensued at Facebook headquarters and
on Facebook itself.

Rising hostility to the tech surge in San
Francisco is met with fury and bewilderment by many Silicon Valley employees. They tend to sound like
Bush-era strategists dumbfounded that the Iraqis didn’t welcome their invasion
with flowers.

Here’s something else you should know about Silicon Valley: according toMother
Jones, 89% of the founding teams of these companies are all male;
82% are all white (the other 18% Asian/Pacific Islander); and women there make
49 cents to the male dollar. Silicon Valley
female powerhouses like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg get a lot of attention
because they’re unusual, black swans in a lake full of white swans. As
Catherine Bracy, on whose research Mother
Jones based its charts, put it, “The current research I’ve seen shows that wealth
creation from the tech industry is extremely unequally distributed, and current
venture capital is going overwhelmingly to a small, homogeneous elite.” That’s
what’s encroaching on San Francisco.

That Pando article chastises us this way: “San Francisco can become a world capital.
First it needs to get over itself.” But maybe we don’t want to be a world
capital or more like New York and Tokyo. The logic of
more-is-better seems unassailable to San
Francisco’s detractors, but inside their more is a lot
of less: less diversity, less affordability, less culture, less continuity,
less community, less equitable distribution of wealth. What’s called wealth in
these calculations is for the few; for the many, it’s impoverishment.

The Armada of the
.0001%

If Google represents the global menace of Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg represents its amorality,
then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison might best represent its crassness. The fifth
richest man in the world, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win the America's
Cup yacht race a few years back. The winner gets to choose the next venue for
the race and the type of boat to be used. So for this summer’s races, Ellison
chose San Francisco
Bay and a giant catamaran
that appears to be exceptionally unstable. Last month, an Olympic-medal-winning
sailor drowned when a boat he was training on capsized in San Francisco Bay, pinning him under its sail.

Part of Ellison’s strategy for winning again evidently
involves making the boats so expensive that almost no one can compete. A race
that once had seven to 15 competitors now has four, and one may drop out.
Business Insider headlined a piece, “Larry Ellison Has Completely Screwed Up
The America's Cup.” It went on to say, “Each team, with the exception of New Zealand's,
is backed by an individual billionaire, and each has spent between $65 million
and $100 million so far.” In typical Silicon Valley-fashion, Ellison also
figured out how to stick San Francisco for a significant part of the tab and
in the process even caused the eviction of a few dozen small businesses, though in the end
the city did not give him a valuable stretch of waterfront he wanted.

Here’s what San
Francisco is now: a front row seat on the most
powerful corporations on Earth and the people who run them. So we know what you
may not yet: they are not your friends and their vision is not your vision, but
your data is their data, and your communications are in their hands, and they
seem to be rising to become an arm of or a part-owner of the government or a
law unto themselves, and no one has yet figured out what we can do about it.

Rebecca Solnit is just winding up
several months as a research fellow at Stanford Libraries and Stanford's Bill Lane
Center for the American
West. Her work there will lead to a book about California history, but her new book, out
this month, is The Faraway Nearby.